If there is one inconvertible truth about scientists, it is that they are inherently curious. Even though they have known for ages that lightning emits radiation, the scientific community wasn’t happy with that knowledge until they could see it for themselves. That’s why graduate student Meagan Schaal, a graduate student working at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne under lightning researcher Joseph Dwyer, developed a camera fast enough to catch X-rays coming off of a lightning strike. The lightning was artificially triggered in December 2010 by launching little rockets with wires attached to them into thunderstorms. The wires helped steer the lightning in the camera’s field of view.

The camera itself is a feat of engineering: it’s a 1,500-pound beast that captures ten million images per second just to get a good shot of the ultra-fast lightning strikes. The camera is roughly the size and shape of a refrigerator and houses an X-ray detector. The box is lead-lined to protect the X-ray detector from stray radiation. As strange as the camera is, it worked like a charm: the first X-ray pictures of lightning are incredible. They show a large concentration of X-rays at the head of the bolt and the radiation tapers off to almost non-existent at the tail.

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Lighting is a fascinating natural force that’s captivated our attention for millennia. We thought scientists had a handle on how it all worked, but nature still has a few surprises for us. Like when volcano seismologist Steven McNutt and a team of colleagues recently discovered an entirely new type of lightning. Intrigued by lightning that accompanied the 1992 Mt. Spurr eruption, McNutt decided to study volcano-related lightning. He got his chance in March of 2009 when Alaska’s Mt. Redoubt erupted.

The research team had to set up their Lightning Mapping Arrays some 50 miles from the volcano in order to have access to electricity and internet. But their equipment – essentially old TV antennae tuned to pick up the frequency lightning radiates from (channel 3, if you’re wondering) – was still able to detect the lightning occurring inside the volcanic ash plume during the volcano’s eruptions.

What the team discovered was basically a new type of dry lightning. Dry lightning forms from the same types of polarizing particles as thunderstorm lightning, but requires no precipitation. What scientists don’t quite understand yet is how the ash plume of an erupting volcano becomes electrified. That’s something that Steven McNutt and his colleagues – as well as many other interested teams – hope to discover soon. In the meantime, they say it’s clear that the lightning that accompanies a volcanic eruption is a distinctive, previously-unnamed type that deserves much future research.

The post Strike of Genius: New Type of Lightning in Volcano Eruptions first appeared on Gajitz.